1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a clock recovery circuit and a phase comparison circuit that is used in the clock recovery circuit. More particularly, the present invention relates to the clock recovery circuit and the phase comparison circuit that can extract a phase-stable clock signal for an input data signal even when a SN (signal-to-noise) ratio of the input data signal is bad.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a conventional high-speed optical communication system, an optical receiving circuit receives a signal having a good SN ratio that does not cause any bit error in transmitted data. In recent years and continuing, high-speed optical communication systems that use error-correcting code are being developed for further increasing transmission distance and for improving transmission speed. In such systems, different from the conventional high-speed optical communication systems, there is a case where an optical receiving circuit receives a signal with a bad SN ratio that may cause a bit error. However, even when a signal output from the optical receiving circuit includes an error, the error can be corrected by a bit error correcting circuit that is connected after the optical receiving circuit, so that error free transmission can be performed.
In the optical receiving circuit, a clock recovery circuit extracts a clock signal from an input data signal so that a decision circuit identifies a data signal by using the clock signal. In the extraction of the clock signal, since there is no merit in adopting the error correcting code, it is required that the optical receiving circuit operate under a more strict environment where the SN ratio of the input signal is bad.
FIG. 1 shows a conventional configuration example of a clock recovery circuit of a PLL type and a decision circuit 2. As shown in FIG. 1, the clock recovery circuit includes a phase comparison circuit 3 that compares phases of a data signal and a clock signal so as to output a signal according to a phase difference, a loop filter 4 that smoothes the signal according to the phase difference, and a voltage control oscillator circuit 5 (VCO) that outputs a clock signal having a frequency according to an output from the loop filter 4. The clock recovery circuit 1 operates such that a phase of the clock signal is put forward (advanced) when the phase of the clock signal is delayed with respect to a phase of the data signal, and the phase of the clock signal is delayed when the phase of the clock signal is advanced with respect to the phase of the data signal.
For reducing identification error in the decision circuit 2 as much as possible, it is desirable that the phase of the output clock signal of the clock recovery circuit 1 correctly follow the phase of the input data signal according to the above-mentioned operations. When a SN ratio of the input signal is good, a phase difference between the data signal and the clock signal is correctly detected in the phase comparison circuit 3, so that the phase of the clock signal is correctly controlled such that phases of the data signal and the clock signal agree with each other.
However, when the SN ratio of the input data signal is not good, the data signal includes noise in an amplitude direction, so that the phase comparison circuit 3 detects a component of phase noise that is converted from the noise. As a result, the phase of the clock signal is controlled to an excessive degree so that problems such as increase of identifying bit errors, increase of jitter of the clock signal, and further, PLL unlock may occur.
As mentioned above, according to the conventional technology, there is a problem in that not only a phase noise component of the data signal is detected but also a noise component in the amplitude direction may be detected as phase noise. Related to this problem, there is a problem in that when a large phase difference that exceeds ±π occurs, a cycle slip occurs in the PLL circuit so that unlock of the PLL circuit occurs.
As for a conventional PLL circuit, when the phase difference between the data signal and the clock signal is within ±π, the phase of the clock signal can be controlled to an optimum phase such that the phase difference becomes 0, so that synchronization of the PLL circuit can be kept, wherein ±π is ±T/2 in time (T is one time slot, and an information unit transmitted in T is one bit). However, when a large phase difference that exceeds ±π occurs, the cycle slip occurs since the PLL circuit operates to control the phase of the clock signal to φ=±2π, so that the unlock of the PLL circuit occurs. This is because the phase comparison circuit 1 for comparing between the data signal and the clock signal has a periodic characteristic of each one time slot of the data signal. As prior art, technologies relating to the clock recovery circuit are disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 5-198101, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 8-139594, and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2000-243042.